Imagine a country where challenging the ruling authoritiesquestioning, say, a piece of data released by central headquarterswould result in mobs of administration sympathizers claiming you should feel "embarrassed" and labeling you a fool, or worse.

Soviet Russia perhaps? Communist China? Nope, that would be the United States right now, when a person (like me, for instance) suggests that a certain government datum (like the September unemployment rate of 7.8%) doesn't make sense.

Making sense is not the intended objective of the now failing obama regime. Making hay while the sun shines IS one of their prime directives, but a strange sort of fodder that may only be consumed by trial lawyers and ambitious cronies who wish to share in the false prosperity of redirected cash flows.

And they want to keep the sun shining, even if they have to hook it up to every power plant in the Universe to supply the necessary energy to keep it burning by both day and night.

Regardless of the eventual bills that must be settled to pay for this brief extravagance.

4
posted on 10/10/2012 6:23:01 AM PDT
by alloysteel
("You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity".)

If you are referring to Welchs tenure at GE, it ended over a decade ago.

Yep. I was there when he made his name -- "Neutron Jack" -- the people go, the buildings stay. If you want to know anything about getting people unemployed, ask Jack. He formed a team to clean out middle management. They did a good job, and when they were finished with that, he fired the team. All heart.

bottom line; this obozo administration has been caught lying so often and about everything that it has lost all credibility, assuming it ever had any. in comparison, Hugo Chavez also has no credibility of telling the truth and he was just reelected.

“But I doubt many of us know any businessperson who believes the economy is growing at breakneck speed, as it would have to be for unemployment to drop to 7.8% from 8.3% over the course of two months.”

I am very happy to see Jack coming out about this even if he is late to the party. I’ll take all the support we can get. But, as you imply, I do feel the same way when I hear the likes of Jack and Mort ZUCKERMAN finally getting it. I’d always assumed they were better business men than I, but where were they 4 years ago?? Maybe their peers would have listened to them then. They sure weren’t listening to us!

Wasnt Welch the father of overseas outsourcing when he was CEO of GE?

Yes. He blew out his employees, and backfilled with H-1B's and "contract employees" who had no benefits, only contracts with human-slavery outfits -- what I call the "secondary employment" market, viz., jobs nobody would take if they could avoid them, but are "arranged" for them by the captains of the people-squashing industry.

A woman of my acquaintance had a contract joblet with a GE subsidiary. Or rather, she had a job with the slave contractor, which had a contract with the GE sub, GE Information Systems (GEIS). Anyway, she was expected and told she was expected to put in a certain number of "casual overtime" hours weekly (no ticket, no pay, no nothing) -- or else. Clearly illegal, but GE insulated itself using contractual relationships, relying on the deference courts pay even to contracts that are unequal and manifestly coercive, and the contractor assumed the risk of federal Wage and Hour Division enforcement actions.

Wasnt Welch the father of overseas outsourcing when he was CEO of GE?

I don't know about "father" of it, but why not assemble US-made device chips in Singapore at a dollar a day per line worker, or for a 14-year-old Irish girl at 75 cents per hour for more complicated stuff? (When he was manager of the Electronic Components Division)

Would you be happier if he had heart but ran GE into the ground and had massive layoffs or went bankrupt?

Happy does not harvest cash. He was doing business in a highly competitive, exploding market in a geopolitical base with a limited menial-job labor pool. He knew that producing semiconductor-intensive smoke alarms with US labor would price you out of the market unless the very skilled semiconductor chip-making was kept in the US, while outsourcing their assembly into SCRs and triacs to Singapore was the only viable economic approach. The simpler 1-amp glass-bead diode technology could be managed with Irish-grown engineers and available infrastructure.

Please note that the semiconductor device market saw a neck-snapping 5X multiplier on the general economics. If the nation had a 1% dip in profits, semiconductors saw a 5% impact. In about 1975, the economy had about 10% dip. At that point, our Semiconductor Products Department released 50% of its employees, permanently and across the board -- managers included. Those to go were the ones with seniority slated for more vacation and broader cost of associated seniority benefits. Also note that outsourced laborers took the biggest and most direct hits, when attempts to preserve the technology base was imperative.

Jack and his philosophy could not survive without shedding the paternalistic protection not only of general non-relocatable employees, but also of engineers and higher-level managers. In comparative technological industries, such as in chemistry-based products, the exemplary Dupont culture of company loyalty did last another 10 years. But that eventually had to go also, and did in the mid-to-late 80s and early 90s. The values of Dupont's culture was turned into cash by Charles and Edgar Bronfman -- the owners of Seagram's Distilleries -- harvested by them from 1982 onward, to the tune of about, say, at least $2 billion in notes taken for their stock holdings in 1995.

China has a bigger, more pliable labor pool than Western societies and no paternalistic morality under socialism. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Anyway, she was expected and told she was expected to put in a certain number of "casual overtime" hours weekly (no ticket, no pay, no nothing) -- or else. Clearly illegal...

It entirely depends on how the job is classfied by the US Dept. of Labor.

It's only illegal for employees classified as "non-exempt" employees such as factory line workers who must be paid for overtime.

For "exempt" employees (exempt from the Fed wage & hours laws) such as professional and management employees, casual (unpaid) overtime is perfectly legal and very common.

I did it for over 30 years, but by the same token, I never punched a time clock in those years and didn't get docked pay for less than 40 hours either when I had a doctors appointment or such. I was only asked to get my assignments done and often it would take more than 40 hours for that.

There were a number of occasions when it was far more than 40 hours, and in some of those cases, they did pay overtime while in others, I was told to take comp time to make up for the extra hours that I worked.

I did like Jack’s comments about the “secrecy” surrounding the preparation and release of the numbers. I think he should have made an analogy to the “Orange Juice Numbers” in the movie Trading Places... As if the BLS guys walk around with the labor stats in a briefcase handcuffed to their wrists.

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